Pages

Friday, February 3, 2012

Happy Happy....

So... It's been a long time since i posted here. A lot longer than i realized, in fact. Did you miss me?
New year's has come and gone, a birthday whizzed by, and a few developments on the writing front, too.
The Augustine Agenda took an honorable mention home from the London Book Festival a couple of weeks ago. I'm still an unknown, but I'm an INTERNATIONAL unknown now! How great is that? ;-)
I worked a lot of extra hours at my day job, which supports my writing habit, so I've been very scarce as of late. The best (?) one came when I tried to go on vacation this past week. I ended up working Christmas AND New Year's this year, so I said to hell with it, and took my first vacation week the week of my birthday. I thought I'd get some rest, because the third book was almost done. I only had one or two more scenes to write. I even had the intention of entering it in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest this year (I missed last year with Escape From Argus). All was looking fine in Writingville.
Then, the contest opened! Yay! I thought. I'lljustput this in, easy peasy, and get down to the vacay. But just to make sure that I had all of my ducks in a row, I read the contest rules one more time...
That's when the panic at the disco started. The minimum word count for a novel in the Amazon contest is 50,000 words.
I had 41,000.
That's when panic set in. I spent the next 5 days pounding in what wound up being about 1500 words a day into what I thought was a finished manuscript. Until finally, at about 4 in the morning yesterday, I had my word count, and admittedly a better book than I'd had 5 days before. I have to give some serious props to those people who do NaNoWriMo every year. 50,000 words in 30 days every November. I had trouble keeping that pace for a week. To keep it up for a whole month? That's some serious writing.
Anyway, I entered the contest, needless to say. I also put my copyright in, got all of my files off to CreateSpace, and ordered a proof copy of my newest book that night. So watch out for The Treos Dilemma. It's coming soon!
I got some sleep on Thursday, but it wasn't nearly enough. So here I am, back at the railyard, waiting for the inspiration to hit me for Book 4.

Followers

About Me

“By
day", I work as a supervisor at a transportation company that I’ve been
with for the last 20 years.

In my
free time, I write. With a lot of
rewriting, a story that I wrote back in 1991 under a different title became my
first novel, The Augustine Agenda, which
I finally got published 2010. It was a
quarter-finalist in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest, and also earned
Honorable Mentions at the 2011 New England Book Festival and the 2011 London
Book Festival.

In
2011, I followed it up with Escape From
Argus, which was another adaptation of an older story. The
Treos Dilemma, is my latest work, is all new material. It was published in February 2012.

My
latest project is a fourth untitled chapter in the Vindicator series, which I’m hoping to have finished by the end of
the year.

Right
now I’m living in Central New Jersey with my wife
Michele and my Mom. They’re my biggest
admirers and my toughest critics.